give up is that primacy in the editing
room. The films are made there. No
amount of rare or never-before-seen
archival material, or even great inter-
views---and they are great---can replace
the triage, the decisions." (When ab-
sorbed in editing, he often ends up sit-
ting on his haunches.) "I seem to know
what we should do next," he said---
both at the start, when the material is
"this incoherent blob," and later. He
told me that Amy Stechler, his first
wife, who collaborated on his early doc-
umentaries, once announced that she'd
cut two frames---a twelfth of a sec-
ond---out of an hour-long film; he iden-
tified the cut.
Two or three years into a major proj-
ect---perhaps at a time when another
series is nearing broadcast, and yet an-
other is being born---Burns is able to
watch a "blind assembly" of a docu-
mentary's first episode. This contains
only two elements: clips from inter-
views and a narration recorded, tem-
porarily, by Burns. Even more than
Peter Coyote, the actor who has be-
come Burns's usual narrator, Burns
makes a script sound like a eulogy read
by a depressive, with every sentence
suggesting slight disappointment. ("He
doesn't like rising tones," Coyote told
me. "Occasionally I get away with it."
He added, "What I'm able to do is
thread the listener through sentences
with lots of subordinate clauses.") There
are no other visuals, so most of the time
the screen is black. I saw a script that
Burns had marked during a blind-
assembly screening of the first episode
of "Country Music." He had crossed
out two-thirds of the early clips, and
he had written notes about what re-
mained: "Nice but later"; "Where's this
coming from?"
His anticipation of an audience's
likely boredom, disquiet, or satisfac-
tion is unusually visceral. He recently
referred to a sequence, in "The Viet-
nam War," in which the testimony
of Bill Zimmerman, an anti-war ac-
tivist, is set against that of an Army
veteran, who describes his dismay at
seeing American protesters carrying
North Vietnamese flags. "What you've
done is allow someone who tensed up
listening to Zimmerman to exhale, "
Burns explained. "And someone who
has exhaled with Zimmerman to say,
'Of course, there's another truth.' "
"The Vietnam War" feels like a de-
parture from Burns's previous work.
It has animated three-dimensional
maps and foreign-language interviews.
There's rock music, as well as a score
commissioned from Trent Reznor and
Atticus Ross; Erik Ewers, a longtime
editor at Florentine, who has worked
on dozens of hours of film chivvied
along by ragtime and bluegrass, told
me, with feeling, that the opportunity
to use "Dazed and Confused," by Led
Zeppelin, was "a dream come true."
The film includes striking sequences
in which well-known black-and-white
photographs, always central to Burns's
work, coëxist with color film and color
photography. The subject, being recent
and contested---and its traumas some-
times evident in the sti ness around
the mouths of witnesses---has its own
narrative potency.The war is not a room
in the House of Americana; the film's
ambition is not to breathe life into the
dead. There's little call for the narra-
tor of the series, or its interviewees, to
talk of its subject as a representation of
America. (From "The Shakers": "They
are, in many ways, the American dream."
"Baseball": "It'll do for a figure for the
American system." "Thomas Hart Ben-
ton": "He knew where America was
and he knew what America was." "Jazz":
"Jazz music objectifies America.")
Still, when the narration begins, its
liturgical phrasing, and its reach for a
negotiated settlement among viewers,
will seem familiar. "America's involve-
ment in Vietnam began in secrecy,"
Coyote announces, in voice-over. "It
ended, thirty years later, in failure, wit-
nessed by the entire world." (An inter-
nal debate about whether "failure"
should be "defeat" lasted for months,
Burns told me.) "It was begun in good
faith, by decent people, out of fateful
misunderstandings, American over-
confidence, and Cold War miscalcula-
tion," Coyote continues. "And it was
prolonged because it seemed easier to
muddle through than admit that it had
been caused by tragic decisions, made
by five American Presidents, belong-
ing to both political parties."
Burns, who is a Democrat, said that
he'd become friendly with Ben Sasse,
the Republican senator from Nebraska,
joking that they'd developed a "bro-
mance." In a recent interview with Tyler
Cowen, Sasse praised Burns, saying,
"One of the things that he's trying to
do is give us a common canon. He's
trying to give us some shared experi-
ences." In a article, in the journal
Rethinking History, David Harlan, a
historian and the author of the "The
Degradation of American History," de-
scribed Burns's major films as "dramas
of integration," referring not only to
the centrality of race in his work---"Base-
ball" pivots around Jackie Robinson---
but to Burns's overarching commit-
ment to the idea of a shared American
culture, one whose values and ideals
"can be found not in European intel-
lectual traditions but in American so-
cial practices, in the myriad things
Americans actually do together." A
Burns documentary seems to have the
ambition of becoming the kind of bind-
ing American experience---the anthem
at a ballgame---that interests Burns as
a filmmaker.
But the promotion of a national
canon requires, first, the suggestion
that the culture is struggling without
it---that there are no other teachers
left. In one of our conversations, Burns
described George Washington as a
quite forgotten man. "If George Wash-
ington can be lost, then anybody can
be lost," he said. He recently told an
audience at the National Press Club
that Vietnam is "a war we have con-
sciously ignored." This viewpoint
seems to overlook decades of popu-
lar fiction and nonfiction, including a
multipart documentary series in the
eighties, on PBS.
Burns's devotion to the United States
as a subject also requires the removal
of foreign distractions. So a viewer of
"Brooklyn Bridge," Burns's first pro-
fessional film, from , would be for-
given for thinking, wrongly, that it de-
scribed the world's first suspension
bridge. The first episode of "Baseball"
barely mentions overseas precursors of
the sport.
Burns also needs to expel intracta-
bility. In the first episode of "The Civil
War," Foote, using words that some
viewers found hard to take, described
the Civil War as the result of a kind of
misunderstanding. "We failed to do the
thing we really have a genius for, which
is compromise," he said. "Americans
THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 4, 2017
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